Feel the Spirits: An Ulster County distillery uses music to make its distinctive whiskeys and ryes

By John Adamian/Life@Home

Published 12:18 pm, Friday, September 3, 2010

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Tuthilltown Distillery (Ben Stechschulte/Life@Home)

Tuthilltown Distillery (Ben Stechschulte/Life@Home)

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Tuthilltown Distillery (Ben Stechschulte/Life@Home)

Tuthilltown Distillery (Ben Stechschulte/Life@Home)

Feel the Spirits: An Ulster County distillery uses music to make its distinctive whiskeys and ryes

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Have you ever heard of the phrase "the angel's share"? It's the term winemakers and distillers use for the small amount of wine or spirit lost to evaporation during the aging process in oak barrels.

Whatever angels are sipping away at the whiskey housed in the barrel room at the Tuthilltown Spirits distillery in Gardiner, N.Y., are probably having a fairly festive time. That's because, in addition to the first-rate spirits -- Tuthilltown has won numerous awards for its whiskeys -- at night music reverberates in the rooms where the spirits mature. Loud music. Music with thumping, feel-it-in-your-chest, sub-sonic bass from about a half dozen speakers. It's not because the staff there is sampling the wares and turning the after hours into a festive party. It's because the vibrations from the speakers are thought to gently agitate the liquid in the barrels, speeding up the interplay between spirit and oak.

Tuthilltown Spirits, which came together as an idea in 2003 and officially got all of its licenses in order in 2005, makes a number of products, including whiskeys, vodkas and sometimes rum. Tuthilltown was the first distillery in New York state to make bourbon. As Gable Erenzo, the company's brand ambassador and distiller, and the son of one of Tuthilltown's co-founders, told me recently, the distillery has helped push a mini-renaissance of micro distilleries around the country, in part because state laws needed to be changed to make such small-scale productions viable.

"Wait a minute," you might be saying. "Isn't bourbon from Kentucky?" Well, not necessarily. Many of the finest bourbons are associated with Kentucky, but though the bourbon designation has a number of specifications -- the percentage of certain types of grain, the type of barrel, the alcohol content and others -- it doesn't need to originate in the Bluegrass State.

Bourbon fanatics get pretty worked up about the quality of the water that gets filtered through the limestone aquifers in Kentucky and how that makes for a mystical interplay between the yeasts and sugar and oak and mash in the distillation process. Gardiner, on the other hand, isn't necessarily known for its drinking water. But Erenzo says the mineral-heavy water of Ulster County makes for a surprisingly excellent spirit.

"The water where we are is not particularly delicious for drinking, because of the minerals," he says, "but coincidentally those same minerals really play nicely with the whiskey and the oak. So you might not want to just drink it out of the tap, but when paired with the spirit going into the barrel, you'll lose a lot of those negative qualities, and you actually are gaining some different tastes that you would never have gotten if you didn't have those minerals in the water."

Great whiskey, like everything else, is a product of its environment, and the ethos of Tuthilltown Spirits is one that fully embraces the region. The distillery buys most of the raw materials for its products from within a bike,ride's radius of the facility. "The majority of our products come from within 10 miles of our distillery," Erenzo says. "We're sourcing all of our corn, the majority of our rye and our wheat, from local farmers."

In addition to the seven whiskeys, Tuthilltown makes two vodkas from local fresh-pressed apple cider that is fermented and distilled. The apples all come from an orchard three miles up the road. "The only thing we don't get locally is the malted barley, and that's because nobody's malting locally."

But that could all change. As Erenzo sees it, the rise of whiskey distilling in the region -- in particular the renewed interest in rye whiskey -- is only a return to tradition. "New York and the Northeast in general was a major rye producer before Prohibition," says Erenzo. "And then during Prohibition everyone replanted; rye isn't a very lucrative crop if you're not making whiskey out of it. The original Manhattan cocktail was made with rye whiskey. If you were drinking whiskey in Manhattan pre-Prohibition -- and probably during most parts of Prohibition -- you were probably drinking rye whiskey from New York state or maybe Pennsylvania."

Farms grew rye as a cover crop, and when they'd cut it down, they could easily make mash out of it, which was storable and transportable. What's old is new again, though. You may have noticed that we're in the middle of a classic cocktail revival. That means bartenders are paying special attention to old recipes as well as learning more about where the spirits behind the bar come from.

"Rye is one of our best sellers, and we make it as fast as we can," he says. "It was sort of forgotten for a long time, but it's starting to make a comeback now."

In addition to helping revive long-neglected spirits, bringing bourbon-making to New York and working with local farmers, Tuthilltown has an innovative approach, as can be seen in their whole serenade-the-booze-with-thumping-bass technique. But there's good reason that Erenzo wants to extract the flavor from those barrels. Tuthilltown works with a cooper out of Minnesota.

"The sizes that we use are non-standard, so we actually have them created for us," he says. "They're all made from white American oak, and then they're charred on the inside. We don't actually reuse our barrels for any of our whiskeys; you can only use them once by law. We do then sell those off to brewers, home-brewers, micro-breweries, winemakers, chefs making vinegars, hot sauces, soy sauces."

You could say that the Tuthilltown style is remarkably of the moment -- tapping into a fetish for small-batch and local products in addition to the cyclical interest in cocktails -- but Erenzo and his father and the eight or so other full-timers who work at the distillery are much closer to a classy, grand tradition than to a fleeting flavor of the month.

The site where the distillery operates was an 18th century gristmill. "This property was always in agricultural use that we're on. It was an industrial classification as a grain-processing plant. It's still very similar, we're just processing grain into something else."